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Tutorial: How to create a vintage look business card in Photoshop

Written on 7 March 2011, published in Tutorials with an astounding 5 comments

Welcome all, today I thought I’d show you how I created my current business card. Any freelance designer needs a real world business card. Contrary to popular belief, us freelancers do sometimes leave the house, if only to stretch our legs. I have included the PSD template at the end of this post. Feel free to adapt the file as you choose.

The only thing I have omitted is the central image…I don’t want to upset anyone for distributing images. As you can see, my finished card above has rounded corners. This is a process carried out by the printer, so be careful about where you place text and images if you wish to do this.

Im using Photoshop CS5 for this tutorial but you can use any version.

Here’s  the finished product ready to go to print.

Business card sizes vary from printer to printer and country to country, so make sure you check with your printer of choice. A very common card size in Europe is 85mm x 55mm.

We’ll create a new document in Photoshop with the dimensions 91mm x 61mm. The document resolution should be set to 300 dpi and the color mode to CMYK. All professional print is done in CMYK so don’t forget, or you may be in for a shock when you get your cards back from the printers!

The final card size after cutting will be 85mm x 55mm, the extra 3mm is the bleed and shouldn’t be overlooked. This allows the printer a margin of 3mm to cut. Also I allow another 3mm inside of the 85mm x 55mm to make sure that any text or images are not placed right on the edge of the business card.

We’ll start with the background first. Double click the background layer in the Layers palette, this will ensure your background is unlocked and therefore editable. Take a light gray colour of your choice and add some noise to give a bit of texture.

Here we’ll create a subtle pattern to overlay on the background. Open up a new document with the dimensions 20px x 20px, resolution 300 and once again, color CMYK.  Select the pencil tool and zoom in to about 500%. Set the pencil thickness to 2px, and draw two lines as below in the image. Select all by pressing CMD+A on the Mac or CTL+A on the PC and go to Edit / define pattern. Give it a name and save it. You can now close this file if you like.

Back to the main document…
In the Layers palette double click the background layer, the Layer Style window will open up. We’re going to overlay the pattern we’ve just created by clicking on Pattern Overlay.

Select your recently made pattern and making the adjustments as shown in the image below.

Now comes the vignette, this will give the card an aged look. For those of you who are working with older versions of Photoshop you can create your vignette like this. Click here.

In the Adjustments window were going to add a Curves Adjustment layer. Set the adjustments according to the image below, or if you prefer, play around with your own settings. Grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool and draw an oval in the center of your card like so…

With the Curves Adjustment layer still selected press Alt+Del to create a mask. Go to your masks window and move the Feather slider to the right until you have a nice, smooth editable vignette. Don’t forget you can always drop the opacity of the vignette layer if it’s a bit too strong.

Next add your main image, as you can see I’m using the image from my website’s header. There are many users on Flickr who are only to happy to share their vintage image collections. Make sure you ask in advance if you plan on using them for anything commercial.

For my text I used the Georgia font as it’s one of the fonts I use on my site. I added these Layer Styles. It gives it a letterpress effect. The style is used on both words although the effect is less evident on the darker text.

To finish off the front of the card, I added my logo. You’ll notice that I haven’t placed it right at the top of the card as we need to take into account the bleed. Be careful with this, as you don’t want unfortunate image placement ruining your beautiful business card.

We already have the basis for the back of the card, simply use the background layers and the text layer styles created for the front. The iMac icon is from a free collection that you can find here. Many thanks to Oliver Twardowski for his talent and generosity.

The sans-serif font is Helvetica Neue, but you can try pretty much any nice sans-serif font. See what you can come up with.

And that’s it!

I hope that you’ve enjoyed my first tutorial. If there’s anything that you feel is unclear, please just leave a comment below, or if you prefer you can drop me a line here.

Here’s the link to download the finished PSD file.

Good luck all!
Nathan